Booth #1.07, NADA 2022

May 5– 8, 2022

NADA at Pier 36
299 South Street
New York, NY 10002

VIP preview:
Thursday, May 5, 10 AM – 4 PM

Public hours:
Thursday, May 5, 4 – 8 PM
Friday, May 6, 11 AM – 7 PM
Saturday, May 7, 11 AM – 7 PM
Sunday, May 8, 11 AM – 5 PM

bitforms gallery is pleased to present five artists exploring the convergence of data and its representations. Data in the form of aggregated statistics, generative landscapes, metadata portraiture, and 3D mythology tender an array of responses that subvert conventions of data visualization.

Auriea Harvey begins her sculptural process by creating forms—the concept, shape, and material data—that serve as a 3D model from which many works are made. Both of Harvey’s digital booth works share the same form, referenced by the artist as The Mystery v5. This form consists of memento mori iconography—a skull, braid, and flowers—that is intertwined with scans of the artist’s own face. However, the differences in execution demonstrate the variety of expression the artist explores within each form. The Mystery v5-dv2 (chroma screen) is a 3D model that allows viewers to scale and rotate the work in augmented reality. The stacked totems can be tiled from floor to ceiling or magnified as a unique vignette. The Mystery v5-dv2 (chroma screen) MYSTCS loop 8 presents a scalable moment from an animated digital sculpture. The artist selects deeply aesthetic loops in contrapuntal rhythms to highlight the sculpture in its most expressive moments.

Harvey’s mother/child is based on a 3D scan the artist took of her niece and son asleep in the back seat of a car. The work is made in the spirit of Michelangelo’s Pietà, a sculpture just a few blocks away from the artist’s home. Harvey views this work as a portrait of motherhood, young motherhood in specifc. The child, wrapped in red silk, leans his head upon his mother’s shoulder in a gesture that prompts comfort as well as the weight of responsibility. Harvey halts the moment with both subjects resting at peace, a momentary equilibrium. The brightly colored silks and ribbons act as a symbol of joy and youthful exuberance

Mimi Ọnụọha In the early 1900s, the U.S. federal government asked sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois to conduct research on Black, rural life in Alabama. Using interviews with over 20,000 residents, he and a team of researchers spent months compiling a report of text, charts, and tables of data. Ultimately, the report was never published. In Absentia begins from this removal and asks what happens when data is made to disappear by those who seek to obscure the intertwined workings of racism and power. The series of prints, which mimic Du Bois’ graphics, complicate assumptions about data’s veracity in both presence and absence. Rather than striving for the goal of Du Bois and his contemporaries — which was to convince U.S. society that Black folks were human and deserved fair treatment—the prints question why such a fact should need evidential proof, and form a meditation on interpretability.

LaJuné McMillian examines embodied metadata, a term that refers to the data about the data our bodies produce, which often eludes recognition by machines and society. This self-portrait series describes how bodies can be accounted for in ways that humanize the self. McMillian’s work challenges digital spaces in terms of how technologic limitations may harm, isolate, restrain, and ignore the needs of Black people. What worlds must be built for the liberated body to exist?

Marina Zurkow and James Schmitz‘s Does The River Flow Both Ways? explores an alternate, present-day Hudson River estuary in which happy social and biological ecosystems live in harmony; a place where humans can interact with the water in intimate ways and experience what is happening below its surface. The title questions whether such a techno-optimistic present is viable. In good faith, the animated, software-driven work imagines a world in which renewables, public transport, water shipment, sensual freedom, and multi-species ecologies can indeed co-exist, even thrive, during a turbulent climactic period. The animated elements emerge primarily in response to algorithmic probability as well as real-time weather and tide data. 

 

Auriea Harvey (b. 1971, Indianapolis, IN)
Lives and works in Rome, Italy

Auriea Harvey’s work combines digital and physical processes to create sculptures in physical space and mixed reality. Drawing from her extensive experience in net art and video games in the collaborative groups Entropy8Zuper!, Tale of Tales, and Song of Songs, she brings personal narratives and character development to her sculptures. Harvey begins her sculptural process by making scans from life. These scans mutate as they are combined with others from her extensive library: 3D models based on her own clay sculptures, works of imagination digitally sculpted, and artworks encountered in museums. The works draw heavily from Hellenistic art, not only through the appropriation of forms but also using its ethos of syncretism as a way of working.

Harvey was curated into Christie’s Auction Proof of Sovereignty in 2021. She is the recipient of a Creative Capital grant and a winner of the Independent Games Festival Nuovo Award. She received NYC.ital grant and is a winner of the Independent Games Festival Nuovo Award. 

Full Bio CV

LaJuné McMillian (b. 1992, New York)
Lives and works in New York, NY

LaJuné McMillian is a multidisciplinary artist and educator creating art that integrates performance, extended reality, and physical computing to question our current forms of communication. They are passionate about discovering, learning, manifesting, and stewarding spaces for liberated Black Realities and the Black Imagination. The artist believes in making by diving into, navigating, critiquing, and breaking systems and technologies that uphold systemic injustices to decommodify our bodies, undo our indoctrination, and make room for different ways of being.

Full Bio CV

Mimi Ọnụọha (b.1989, Italy).
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

Mimi Ọnụọha is a Nigerian-American artist whose work highlights the absences that result from fitting the world into forms of data. Her multimedia practice uses print, text, code, installation and video to unpack the power dynamics that result in different groups’ different relationships to systems that are simultaneously digital, cultural, and ecological. Her recent work includes In Absentia, a series of prints that borrow language from research by Black sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois conducted in the nineteenth century to address the difficulties he faced and the pitfalls he fell into, and A People’s Guide To AI, a comprehensive beginner’s guide to understanding AI and other data-driven systems, co-created with Diana Nucera.

Full Bio CV


Marina Zurkow (b.1962, New York, NY)
Lives and works in New York, NY

Marina Zurkow is a media artist focused on near-impossible nature and culture intersections. She uses life science, materials, and technologies – including food, software, animation, clay and other biomaterials – to foster intimate connections between people and non-human agents. 

Zurkow is a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow. She has also been granted awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is a teaching fellow at Bennington College and a research fellow at the ITP / Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. 

Full Bio CV

 

More information about NADA 2022.